David Retchless

Although there is extensive research on first order climate change beliefs, second-order beliefs (perceptions about what others believe) are an understudied and potentially highly influential factor tied to a lack of climate policy action. This map reading study employs a pre- and post-map observational design to investigate how interactive maps can reveal and update second-order climate change beliefs. Participants first completed a pre-map survey detailing their climate change beliefs and estimating public support for climate policies. Participants then completed map reading tasks on an interactive web map that visualized county-level climate change opinions in North Carolina, while their eye movements were recorded with an eye tracker. A post-map survey gauged participants’ reactions to the actual climate opinions, accompanied by map usability questions. The results showed a widespread underestimation of actual climate policy support among participants. Participants commonly used a set of environmental and humanistic concerns to justify the content of their own beliefs, but when asked to rationalize others’ beliefs using the map, they used conspiratorial or ideological explanations to describe others who were more skeptical of climate policy. Additionally, participants exhibited egocentric bias, focusing more on their home counties and those with extreme climate change opinions when exploring the web map. The research underscores the potential of interactive maps to improve the understanding of second-order climate change beliefs and emphasizes opportunities for enhancing their ability to communicate the broad public support that exists for many climate policies.

Rapid urbanization, climate change, and aging infrastructure pose significant challenges to achieving sustainability and resilience goals in urban building energy use. Although retrofitting offers a viable solution to mitigate building energy use, there has been limited analysis of its effects under various weather conditions associated with climate change in urban building energy use simulations. Moreover, certain parameters in energy simulations necessitate extensive auditing or survey work, which is often impractical. This research proposes a framework that integrates various datasets, including building footprints, Lidar data, property appraisals, and street view images, to conduct neighborhood-scale building energy use analysis using the Urban Modeling Interface (UMI), an Urban Building Energy Model (UBEM), in a coastal neighborhood in Galveston, Texas. Seven retrofit plans and three weather conditions are considered in the scenarios of building energy use. The results show that decreasing the U-value of building envelopes helps reduce energy use, while increasing the U-value leads to higher energy consumption in the Galveston neighborhood. This finding provides direction for coastal Texas cities, like Galveston, to update building standards and implement retrofit measures.

As climate change intensifies, resulting in more severe rainfall events, coastal cities globally are witnessing significant life and property losses. A growingly crucial component for flood prevention and relief are urban storm flood simulations, which aid in informed decision-making for emergency management. The vastness of data and the intricacies of 3D computations can make visualizing the urban flood effects on infrastructure daunting. This study offers a 3D visualization of the repercussions of hurricane storm surge flooding on Galveston, TX residences, illustrating the impact on each structure and road across varied storm conditions. We employ target detection to pinpoint house door locations, using door inundation as a metric to gauge potential flood damage. Within a GIS-based framework, we model the damage scope for residences exposed to varying storm intensities. Our research achieves three core goals: 1) Estimating the storm inundation levels on homes across different storm conditions; 2) Assessing first-floor elevations to categorize housing damages into three distinct groups; and 3) Through visualization, showcasing the efficacy of a proposed dike designed to shield Galveston Island from future storm surge and flood events.

Coastal embayments provide vital benefits to both nature and humans alike in the form of ecosystem services, access to waterways, and general aesthetic appeal. These coastal interfaces are therefore often subject to human development and modifications, with estuarine embayments especially likely to have been anthropogenically altered. Frequent alterations include damming to eliminate tidal influx, backfilling to create new land, and development for the sake of economic gain, which may cause profound damage to local habitats. By providing a record of transitions in surface waters over time, satellite imagery is essential to monitoring these coastal changes, especially on regional to global scales. However, prior work has not provided a straightforward way to use these satellite-derived datasets to specifically delineate embayed waters, limiting researchers’ ability to focus their analyses on this ecologically and economically important subset of coastal waters. Here, we created ICEDAP, a geometry-based ArcGIS toolbox to automatically delineate coastal embayments and quantify coastal surface water change. We then applied ICEDAP to the coast of South Korea, and found that coastal habitat change was particularly profound within embayed regions identified using an 8 km epsilon convexity setting (denoting a moderate distance from the coast and degree of enclosure by surrounding land areas). In the mapped coastal embayments, more than 1400 km² of coastal habitats were lost during the past 38 years, primarily due to human modification such as large-scale land reclamation projects and the construction of impoundments. Our results suggest that anthropogenic alterations have resulted in the widespread loss of more than USD 70 million of valuable coastal ecosystem services. Together, ICEDAP provides a new innovative tool for both coastal scientists and managers to automatically identify hotspots of coastal change over large spatial and temporal scales in an epoch where anthropogenic and climate-driven changes commonly threaten the stability of coastal habitats.

Introduction: As knowledge in the scientific community increases regarding how anthropogenic CO₂ loading of the atmosphere will impact future hurricane activity, the need for effective and accurate communication of hurricane risk in coastal communities—specifically to non-scientific stakeholders—also increases.Methods: To better inform hurricane risk communication, this study employs a survey of U.S. Gulf Coast residents immediately following the active 2017 hurricane season to consider how message framing (as established by communicator word choice) and stakeholders' experience may affect receptivity to hurricane hazard information. Specifically, it tests how respondents' perceptions of hurricane risk varied with prior experience and following exposure to randomly assigned, infographic-based depictions of trends in major hurricane (≥ category 3, Saffir Simpson Scale) frequency. The set of randomly assigned infographics varied in both temporal framing (past-to-present trends based on paleo data versus present-to-future trends based on climate projections) and causal framing (‘climate change' versus ‘ocean and atmospheric change').Results: Damaging hurricane experience may be associated with a tendency towards increasing hurricane risk perceptions after viewing the infographics. For framing effects, temporal framing of hurricane risk messages matters, with forward-looking framings (future projections) causing increased perceptions of risk and storm frequency; effects of causal framing were not significant. The results also show that Gulf Coast residents tend to be more optimistic about the future frequency of major hurricanes than most scientists and, consistent with confirmation and optimism biases, are somewhat resistant to changing their prior risk beliefs based on infographic exposure.Discussion: These results suggest that future projections – rather than paelo analogs – may be best for quickly communicating expected increases in hurricane risk. Communicators should consider these factors when translating scientific hurricane risk information to the public.

Despite widespread acceptance amongst researchers, climate change and responses to it remain a socially and politically debated topic. Within cartography and cognate disciplines, this has often been construed as an issue of communication: maps are tools for communication and better maps will lead to greater understanding of and responses to climate change. While existing research has shown some support for the efficacy of such approaches, this article calls into question the underlying assumptions of access and equity that pervade such communicative approaches to mapmaking and data visualization. Two new case studies from the authors’ research group highlight the importance of greater consideration of equity and access for climate change communication cartography (CCCC): first, an experiment on the use of storytelling and narrative in maps of climate impacts and, second, an augmented reality tool that presented users with storm surge information for their region. These two cases lead us to an interrogation of the assumptions that undergird claims for the rhetorical power of using cartographic stories and augmented reality. It is, we argue, somewhat of a luxury to experience climate change through stories, not lived experiences or through augmented reality, as opposed to forced displacement. We conclude by reinterrogating the map communication model in light of understandings of maps as constantly made and remade by both map author and map user. By calling into question the ontogenetic security of maps, CCCC can better understand both the impacts and equities of its maps.